“Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Repression, a degree of restraint, and a little dedication to self-editing belong to love just as surely as a capacity for explicit… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Our ‘ego’ or self-conception could be pictured as a leaking balloon, forever requiring the helium of external love to remain inflated and… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Everyone endeavours to eliminate through the other individual his own weaknesses, defects, and deviations from the type, lest they be perpetuated or… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
When work is not going well, it's useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We don't exist unless there is someone who can see us existing, what we say has no meaning until someone can understand,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
People who hold important positions in society are commonly labelled "somebodies," and their inverse "nobodies"-both of which are, of course, nonsensical descriptors,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Ordinary life rewards a practical, unintrospective outlook. There's too little time and too much fear for anything else. We let ourselves be… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“While paying attention to the messages in its public spaces, Christianity also wisely recognizes the extent to which our concepts of good… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“To be mature is, we're told, to move beyond possessiveness. Jealousy is for babies. The mature person knows that no one owns anyone.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“We could not be fulfilled if we weren't inauthentic some of the time—inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I like the values associated with a medical family - common sense, being practical but also thoughtful. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Anyone who urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“We can then recognize that we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Half the ingratitude and complacency in the world down to how slowly and imperceptibly most good and bad things unfold.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
